When the police arrived at the scene of horror in Southport last summer, the teenager holding the knife was someone they had been called about many times before.
From the age of 13, Axel Rudakubana had been on the radar of police, safeguarding services, mental health teams and Prevent, the counterterrorism programme.
His obsession with mass murder was known about. The risk he posed was clear.
Yet there was nothing to stop him going to a dance class, murdering Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and attempting to murder many more.
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The timeline of contact with the authorities reveals Rudakubana had not slipped through the net – he was in the system. It failed.
The public inquiry that will now take place needs to examine why.
‘Limited options for social workers’
Dr Ciaran Murphy, a former social worker and member of the Association of Child Protection Professionals, believes services designed to protect children are now facing more cases where children are themselves the risk.
“That’s an area where we need to evolve,” he said. “There’s an increasing occurrence of referrals being made in which parents are afraid of their children in terms of violence and mental health.”
He said options for social workers are limited. “You’d still be thinking about the child protection plan, you’d still be thinking about a strategy meeting,” he said. “But ultimately, social workers cannot detain children.
“The obvious answers are multi-agency communication, multi-agency work, particularly with the police and programmes like Prevent. But then when you do that, you start to see some of the holes in the system.”
“In extreme cases, they can apply for a secure order for a child in which a child is placed in secure accommodation,” Dr Murphy explained, but he said they are “very difficult to obtain, partly because it’s so costly, partly because it’s so draconian”.
The orders have to be granted by the family courts and only apply to children under the age of 16.
Rudakubana’s multiple contact with police
The police were first alerted to Rudakubana when he took a knife into school in 2019. It led to his exclusion, and referrals to the Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH) and the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS).
But he returned to the school months later with a knife in his bag and attacked a pupil with a hockey stick. He pleaded guilty to assault and a youth referral order was imposed.
Between 2019 and 2021 he was referred three times to Prevent. The first referral was for researching school shootings during an IT class. Another referral was made when a teacher found he’d been reading about the London Bridge terror attack. However, he was not deemed a terrorism risk.
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In 2021, Rudabukana was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Later that year, following reports of incidents at home, he stopped attending school.
In 2022, his mother reported him missing and police found him on a bus carrying a knife. Officers were called by the driver because he was refusing to pay. He was returned home and his mother was given advice on how to secure knives.
Four of the calls to the police about him in the years before the attack were made by his own parents.
Read more:
Rudakubana received second longest sentence in history – No 10
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‘They often don’t fit into any particular box’
Dr Duncan Harding, a consultant adolescent forensic psychiatrist, said “a case like this just highlights how systems have to be made as robust as possible, to try and pick up people who perhaps are acting in a lone way with extreme ideologies. Perhaps ideologies don’t fit into any particular box”.
“Working with young people, who present with perhaps mental health difficulties, perhaps neurodiversity, criminal behaviours. I’ve worked with many young people who fit into that category, and they often don’t fit into any particular box. What that can mean is that they might fall under the threshold of any one particular service.”
He added: “I think that when something dreadful happens, when something absolutely dreadful happens that shakes society in this way, we have to look at the systems, we have to look at things like thresholds.”
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There is consensus that more should have been done to stop Rudakubana.
Finding the cracks in a system that failed will be the task of the public inquiry.
